A message from Andrew Rasiej, Tech President's Publisher

Thank you for visiting techPresident, where politics and technology meet. We’re asking our readers to help support the site. Let us tell you why:

Since 2007, we've expanded techPresident's staff and daily work to exhaustively look at how technology is changing politics, government and civic life. To provide the independent and deeply informed journalism we do, we need to find ways to support this growth that will allow us to keep the majority of our content free.

First POST: Oligarchs for a Little Less Corruption

Jamie Johnson, a scion of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical giant, "reports" for The New York Times' Style Section (!) on a recent closed-to-the-media summit of young American billionaires, the children of some of the country's great oligarchs. They were discussing "collaborations between the [Obama] administration and philanthropists," in the words of Thomas Kalil, the deputy director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, who organized the meeting.

About that story, Paul Krugman comments, "Yes, Democrats pay a lot of attention to plutocrats….but it's quite wrong to say that the parties' behavior in office is the same."

Alexander Burns and Alex Byers report on Sean Parker's growing foray into national politics. “He’s got political views on various topics but his main agenda is sort of making democracy more modern, less corrupt,” VC Ben Horowitz says.

Here's Parker's 9,500-word defense of his $4.5 million Lord of the Rings fantasy wedding, in case you missed it.

Back in the mid-1990s, the good people of Austin, Texas offered their own commentary on this kind of politics with their "Austinites for a Little Less Corruption" petition for campaign finance reform.

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and Y Combinator's Sam Altman are hosting a top-dollar fundraiser for the DNC May 8, featuring President Obama, Carla Marinucci reports for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Jon Ward of Huffington Post goes deep into the efforts to re-engineer the GOP's voter data plumbing, and what he finds reads like Rube Goldberg meets Ayn Rand.

In the Daily Beast, Noah Schachtman cites two sources "close to" Edward Snowden expressing concern that his taped question of Russian President Vladimir Putin about surveillance there didn't go well.

The New York Times front-pages the Open Technology Institute's mesh networking "Commotion" project, featuring its pilot project in Tunisia.

The Pirate Party has elected just two members of the 750-member European Parliament, but according to Pirate Times' Josef Ohlsson Collentine, they've managed to accomplish a lot, including stopping ACTA, weakening the "three strikes" assault on file-sharing, protection of net neutrality, and the spread of their policy ideas to the Greens and other EP deputies.